If Ketamine were a style of music, it would probably sound a lot like Zabus does on their latest album, Whores of Holyrood. Or so I’ve heard, these days I don’t drink coffee after three in the afternoon, so it’s not really my area of expertise. But they say that the effect is hallucinogenic, dark and disconcerting, calming to the point of sedation, producing out-of-body experiences, and amnesiac episodes. Well, Whores of Holyrood is a sonic mirror that reflects all of those things, sometimes all at once.
Their fifth album in two years, (wow, someone tell them that this isn’t the sixties) here they draw on a wide range of outsider echoes and elements, draw lines connecting all manner of bands who were, and indeed some who still are, making music in the dark, liminal spaces where the mainstream fear to tred, bridging gaps between art and adventure and blurring lines between even the fringe genres.
The opener, “Shadow Genesis (Reprise),” (reprise because it is a link to the previous album) sets the tone with a bleak and icy blast of music, as much a product of an arrangement of chilling, atmospheric voids as it is sound itself, and even the minimal instrumentation feels like shards of sonic art more than conventional music.
The title track adheres to more structured templates, sounding like Jim Morrison pushing the boundaries of The Doors’ more gothic blues urges and pre-empting bands like Bauhaus by at least a decade. There are moments of psychedelic deconstruction with “Sod Martyr,” glitchy post-rock sermons with “A Multitude of Cruelties,” and “Let’s Pretend It’s Freedom” is Scott Walker fronting Spacemen 3 as they drift off into the ether and fade from awareness.
If you take your time to understand what’s going on here, you find a very political album. Sometimes conveyed in the message itself, but more often through a sense of rebellious creativity. In its musical folds and boundary-testing, cross-pollination and outsiderness, it reminds us not to fall victim to fads and fashion, especially when dealing with political ideology and worldviews. It tells us to think for ourselves, whether by rejecting existing conventions or at least questioning why things are the way they are. Do that, and the propaganda and demarcations, media rhetoric and bitter entrenchments start to unravel.
If there is anything we need more than people asking questions, people adopting roads less travelled, people offering alternatives, then I have yet to find it. Today might be a small revolution, such as challenging music; tomorrow might be about questioning the very norms and traditions of society itself!
Bandcamp
YouTube
Saccharine Underground
